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Left
or Right, these writers to fight
Madambu, Kadammanitta, Punathil don’t bother to play politicians
Rajeev P.
I.
Kochi, April
30: Language may be an index of the mind. But it usually takes
crass rhetoric to wins polls. The three wordsmiths at Konni, Kodungalloor
and Beypore are trying hard to be themselves, inside their political
garb.
Madambu Kunjikuttan — writer, actor, scriptwriter, vedic scholar,
CPI activist and, lately, ‘‘Indian communist’’
by his own definition — is not given to flying rhetorical kites.
The sixty-year-old author of the powerfully earthy Bhrasht remains
decidedly realistic. ‘‘I can only promise to try to bring
drinking water to you all,’’ he tells the voters, in each
meeting his BJP-sponsors convene for him in Kodungalloor.
He probably means it too. In pastoral Kodungalloor, which has big
population of coconut farmers, coir workers and fishermen, issues
like lopsided development priorities make excellent poll planks.
But Kunjikuttan won’t oblige. ‘‘I honestly don’t
think I can do much on these issues,’’ the writer candidly
tells the gatherings.
‘‘Transplanted communism failed because it couldn’t
adapt to Indian realities. I believe the indigenous BJP offers a
path to the truly Indian communism I have in mind,’’ he
tells you. And Kunjikuttan swears that his candidature is not a
one-off freak, that he intends to stay in politics.
In Konni, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan doesn’t have the debutante’s
advantage. He had played CPM’s David to M.V. Raghavan’s
Goliath in Aranmula, last time. His poetry may be known for the
fierce energy in them, but his maiden performance in the Assembly
could not quite match his felicity with the pen.
The poet had wanted to have a go at the polls from Aranmula again,
but the CPI(M) asked him to change places with A. Padmakumar, who
had lost from Konni last time. He is also acutely aware that rhyme
doesn’t pay in polls. Besides, the local CPI)M) workers had
originally clamoured for a full-fledged party worker there.
But Konni had bucked trends often, and the margins have invariably
been wafer thin. Rarely had a winner’s margin overshot 2,000
votes.
‘‘I want to retain my political honesty,’’ says
the author of Kirathavritham and Kurathi. He is banking on his image
there, just 20 kilometres from his native Kadammanitta village.
In Beypore, Dr Punathil Kunhabdulla filed his nomination paper during
the propitious minutes between 12 noon and 12.07 pm which an astrologer
had calculated for his BJP sponsors.
The small man from Vatakara with the ubiquitous brown briefcase
is yet to be familiar to the Beypore voters. Many of them are fishworkers,
labourers and farmers, who cannot be expected to have read his Smarakashilakal.
Sixty-one-year-old Kunhabdulla, who kickstarted his campaign from
the castle of the Beypore Sultan Vaikom Mohammed Basheer radiates
the eagerness of a child: ‘‘I was busy with my son’s
marriage, and had to stay away during the last week. But nothing
will hold me back.”
He isn’t bothered that fellow writers have chosen to keep off
his campaign. ‘‘They don’t oppose my decision. Even
pro-CPI(M) writers had rung me up to say they felt bad that they
can’t campaign for me. M.T. Vasudevan Nair said he was all
for writers getting into politics,’’ he said.
Kunhabdulla faces an obvious double burden: He has to push the BJP
concept in this CPI(M) bastion, and put himself up to the speculations
and questions a BJP-sponsored Muslim candidate has to invariably
face.
(With inputs from N.V. Davis in Kodungalloor, Arun in Konni and
Salim Joseph in Beypore)
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